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MooO TransparentMenu is a free utility that lets you make your Windows menus semitransparent and change their color scheme. Why would you want to do that? Well, as the developer points out, sometimes it just looks better. Transparency is one of the cooler Aero features in Windows because it lets you see what's behind a window without obscuring its content. Applying it to context menus in Windows is a great idea; TransparentMenu makes it happen.

TransparentMenu's installer let us choose whether to create a desktop icon or start menu shortcut, but the program's main interface is its … Read more

KlickFu is a small suite of free desktop toys. Classic time-wasters, the games and enhancements don't really "do" anything, let alone accomplish anything beyond creating a brief diversion. KlickFu makes it easy to share your efforts on Facebook, should you want to.

KlickFu's Get Started page briefly summarizes its features, though most of the time you manage and access them from the program's system tray icon. Dragster Photos displays a photo from your Pictures library (or any folder) when you drag your cursor to highlight an area of your desktop. We do that accidentally now … Read more

Sugestron Speed Dial is a free Firefox add-on that lets users quickly return to any of their eight most frequently used Web sites. That's nothing new, you say, but Speed Dial also examines browser tabs and other non-Web locations, and it works automatically by analyzing your browsing habits. You can open pages with keystrokes, pin pages into position, and remove them quickly from the Speed Dial browser tab.

Speed Dial downloads, installs, and configures like any Firefox add-on. We opened the add-ons manager and clicked Speed Dial's More link, which took us to its program page. The page … Read more

Photo Event Organizer takes a unique approach to organizing your digital snapshots: it scans your images and automatically organizes them based on the day they were taken, called the Event. Events don't have to be a big deal--"that day you took a bunch of pictures" will do. But the idea makes sense since folks tend to snap a lot of pictures on birthdays, dates, at ballgames, and other events, then plug in their USB cable and and upload the lot to one big archive, sometimes even one big folder.

While Photo Event Organizer's compressed file … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software took the hardware acceleration plunge today with the release of its first alpha version of Opera 12, code-named Wahoo.

Hardware acceleration offers a range of benefits to Web browsers--faster performance, lower battery consumption, and new features that would be otherwise impractical. So it's no surprise that browser makers--catalyzed in part by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9--have been rebuilding their engines to support the idea.

But Opera, while not the first with hardware acceleration, thinks it's got a competitive approach. It uses hardware for everything its Vega display engine handles--font display, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) effects, … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software is a browser company, but its chief technology officer believes the modern Web still could learn a thing or two from publishing technology that's hundreds of years old.

At the company's Up North Web press event here, CTO Haakon Wium Lie showed off a new standard he proposed that could give Web pages more of the feel of printed pages. A document too big for a single screen, instead of getting a scroll bar, would be split across several pages, and people can navigate among them with gestures--swiping left and right to go forward and … Read more

OSLO--The next version of Opera Software's browser will get a major graphics-hardware boost, an approach that's been spreading to browsers keen to increase battery life, improve performance, and enable new features.

"Everything is accelerated," said Jan Standal, Opera's vice president of desktop products, in an interview today at the company's Up North Web press event here about Opera 12. "The whole user interface."

Specifically, that means hardware acceleration for Cascading Style Sheets transitions and animations, for Canvas 2D drawing, and for text, he said. And Opera 12 gets support for the WebGL … Read more

Whether you're a sports fan or not, basketball games are often some of the best-made games on any platform. The latest news in the ongoing NBA lockout (which began July 1) is that the owners have decided to skip the preseason entirely, and if the players and owners don't come to an agreement by the end of the day on Monday, they may start to cancel regular season games.

Whichever side of the argument you're on, the iTunes App Store has more than enough basketball-type games to keep you occupied. What's particularly interesting is how developers have come up with clever ways to use the touch screen to play basketball-like games.

This week's collection of apps is all about basketball. The first lets you slam-dunk a basketball with a swipe of your finger. The second lets you shoot baskets and challenge others online against a sci-fi backdrop. The third is the iOS version of a megapopular console basketball game.… Read more

We may not see a single NBA game being played this year, but gamers won't be left out with the release of NBA 2K12 on iOS devices for the first time.

The NBA 2K series has been the top-rated basketball simulation 11 years running, and it makes perfect sense to bring the high-flying action to the iPad ($9.99), and to the iPhone and iPod Touch ($4.99). The games will be released October 4.

The game's maker, 2K Sports, takes a unique approach to the touch-screen interface by offering two ways to control the game. Classic Control … Read more